Tortellini with Three Sauces

One of the places I worked at had their company Christmas dinner at a restaurant where the appetizer was pasta with two or three different sauces. They didn’t use tortellini, and I do not remember pesto, but this gave us the idea to make the same sort of thing for dinner with tortellini, but any pasta could be used.

Brian liked to make this a lot - frozen Cheese Tortellini (he liked the tortellini with three cheeses) served with these three sauces. The dish is fairly quick to make, especially if you use store-bought marinara sauce and have some pesto on hand (fresh or frozen), and the combination is quite interesting. The tortellini is plated with the sauces separate, but as you eat the tortellini, the sauces will start to intermingle, so a fork of tortellini with the cheese sauce on it may get a little pesto on it, etc. And, similar to a lot of other Italian dishes, it represents the three colors of the Italian flag.

1. Marinara Sauce - we found we liked Classico’s Marinara Sauce and usually used this
2. Parmesan Cheese Sauce - taste-test the sauce and add more parmesan if needed. He would often add other cheeses with the Parmesan.
3. Pesto - We always used the basil from our garden, so when the basil got big enough we started thinking about pesto. Brian would also make the pesto with just the basil and oil and freeze it so he could make pesto in the winter and other months when we had no fresh basil. He would add the garlic and pine nuts when we were going to eat it. Again, taste-test and add more pine nuts, garlic, etc.